[email protected] www.elpro.com.au Secure Industrial Communications 35+ years and still transmitting! CASE STUDY Condor Improves Comms at German Tunnel Project As you can imagine digging a tunnel means handling a lot of excess rock. Once unearthed these rocks are placed onto the conveyor and delivered to the loading yard where it is collected and dumped into waiting trucks. All sounds very simple. Dig out rocks, place rocks on the conveyor, rocks are dumped into a truck, truck removes rock from the site. But, what happens when the radio system breaks down, is that trucks were not receiving the information that the rocks were ready to collect. This created stockpiles of excess rock. Imagine trying to manage a fleet of 600 trucks every day collecting rocks, moving rocks and moving around the site and when some of the trucks did collect the rock, they were not being issued with full loads. Queues of trucks started to form and idle trucks cost a lot of money, something had to be done about this radio issue. Close to Stuttgart, Germany a new tunnel is being mined for a railway and an ever-expanding community of rail users, it's not an easy task and there are lots of factors to consider with such a large infrastructure project. Being efficient is not just a German quality, it is a business quality and when timeframes started to blow out the contractor knew they had to investigate to see what the problem was to get back on track. It appeared that the radio system they were using was unreliable and would often breakdown which led to serious downtime and trucks not receiving the right instructions. ABOUT PERICOM Pericom, an industrial communication provider in Germany were called in to help solve the problem. For over 18 years Pericom has been working to solve industrial long-range communication problems using their broad, coordinated product portfolio and competent advice. The team at Pericom went out to the Tunnel site and carried out a ‘measurement in advance’ to assess the scope of the problem. They then came back to the office and devised a new way of configuring the radio comms on the site, this included re-establishing the locations of the stations and the repeaters around the site and solving the problem of data transmission to help maintain a consistent weight of loads.